It’s likely the person who was the least surprised about Richard Sherman’s season-ending injury Thursday night was Richard Sherman.
The Seattle Seahawks cornerback ruptured his Achilles tendon in the Seahawks’ 22-16 win over the Arizona Cardinals. His season is over, and he becomes the latest on a long list of NFL superstars who saw their seasons end prematurely due to injury.
That it happened on “Thursday Night Football” likely adds insult to injury for the 29-year-old Sherman … he essentially called his shot.
Late last season, Sherman on The Players Tribune wrote a piece titled “Why I Hate Thursday Night Football,” calling the league’s midweek spectacle “ludicrous” and “hypocritical.”
Sherman documented the mindset of a player on short rest preparing for a Thursday night game while also trying to recover from playing the previous Sunday. When Thursday rolls around, Sherman explained, players try to get amped up but aren’t physically ready.
“But this time, your body isn’t ready,” he wrote. “You’re still sore from Sunday’s game. You’re going to go out there and compete and give everything you have because that’s what you do. But your body just won’t have as much to give as it would have had on a full week’s rest.”
Sherman landed on the injury report with an Achilles injury before kickoff Thursday night. Maybe he was doomed to rupture the tendon whether the game was on Thursday or Sunday, but it’s fair to wonder what the extra few days would have done for the healing process.
Is “Thursday Night Football” the sole reason Sherman’s season is over? Of course not, but it didn’t help, either. And as Sherman detailed a year ago, there’s a level of hypocrisy on the NFL’s part. If player safety was of utmost importance, “Thursday Night Football” probably wouldn’t be a thing, at least not how it’s currently constructed.
